1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to information processing apparatuses and methods for processing a vector image composed of a plurality of objects described by structured document data.
2. Description of the Related Art
Vector images have an advantage of being capable of representing high-quality objects. Examples of graphics drawing application software for creating and editing such vector images include Illustrator® from Adobe Systems Incorporated. Illustrator® allows for editing of images by moving objects in a specified area.
An exemplary extensible markup language (XML)-based language for describing vector images is scalable vector graphics (SVG) which is compliant with specifications developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards body. For example, an SVG file describing a vector image shown in FIG. 1 is transferred via a communication network to a device with low processing capabilities. In this case, even if only an area 1003 is a graphic area that the user wishes to send, all objects 1000 to 1002 in FIG. 1 must be turned into graphics. This not only places a heavy load on the receiving device, but also results in a long transfer time and the usage of a large amount of memory in the receiving device. In particular when, as shown in FIG. 2, FIG. 3, and FIG. 4, only a small portion of a graphics, text, or image object is included in a specified area 2000, 3000, or 4000, it is possible that a large amount of memory space is used up by unnecessary data.